IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE: LIVE IN CHICAGO! BACKSTAGE GUIDE 17 You’ve solved everything. I was afraid you were going to give me some trouble. But now you’ve got the solution yourself. You wish you’d never been born. All right! OK! You haven’t!” “What do you mean?” George growled. “You haven’t been born. Just that. You haven’t been born. No one here knows you. You have no respon-sibilities—no job—no wife—no children. Why, you haven’t even a mother. You couldn’t have, of course. All your troubles are over. Your wish, I am happy to say, has been granted—officially.” “Nuts!” George snorted and turned away. The stranger ran after him and caught him by the arm. “You’d better take this with you,” he said, holding out his satchel. “It’ll open a lot of doors that might otherwise be slammed in your face.” “What doors in whose face?” George scoffed. “I know everybody in this town. And besides, I’d like to see anybody slam a door in my face.” “Yes, I know,” the little man said patiently. “But take this anyway. It can’t do any harm and it may help.” He opened the satchel and displayed a number of brushes. “You’d be surprised how useful these brushes can be as introduction—especially the free ones. These, I mean.” He hauled out a plain little hairbrush. “I’ll show you how to use it.” He thrust the satchel into George’s reluctant hands and began: “When the lady of the house comes to the door you give her this and then talk fast. You say: ‘Good evening, Madam. I’m from the World Cleaning Company, and I want to present you with this handsome and useful brush absolutely free—no obligation to purchase anything at all.’ After that, of course, it’s a cinch. Now you try it.” He forced the brush into George’s hand. George promptly dropped the brush into the satchel and fumbled with the catch, finally closing it with an angry snap. “Here,” he said, and then stopped abruptly, for there was no one in sight. The little stranger must have slipped away into the bushes growing along the river bank, George thought. He certainly wasn’t going to play hide-and-seek with him. It was nearly dark and getting colder every minute. He shivered and turned up his coat collar. The street lights had been turned on, and Christmas candles in the windows glowed softly. The little town looked remarkably cheerful. After all, the place you grew up in was the one spot on earth where you could really feel at home. George felt a sudden burst of affection even for crotchety old Hank Biddle, whose house he was passing. He remembered the quarrel he had had when his car had scraped a piece of bark out of Hank’s big maple tree. George looked up at the vast spread of leafless branches towering over him in the darkness. The tree must have been growing there since Indian times. He felt a sudden twinge of guilt for the damage he had done. He had never stopped to inspect the wound, for he was ordinarily afraid to have Hank catch him even looking at the tree. Now he stepped out boldly into the roadway to examine the huge trunk. Hank must have repaired the scar or painted it over, for there was no sign of it. George struck a match and bent down to look more closely. He straightened up with an odd, sinking feeling in his stomach. There wasn’t any scar. The bark was smooth and undamaged. He remembered what the little man at the bridge had said. It was all nonsense, of course, but the nonexistent scar bothered him. When he reached the bank, he saw that something was wrong. The building was dark, and he knew he had turned the vault light on. He noticed, too, that someone had left the window shades up. He ran around to the front. There was a battered old sign fastened on the door. George could just make out the words: FOR RENT OR SALE Apply JAMES SILVA Real Estate Perhaps it was some boys’ trick, he thought wildly. Then he saw a pile of ancient leaves and tattered newspapers in the bank’s ordinarily immaculate